A couple of my friends and I got a DedicatedNow server to start learning on, and to host some of our personal sites and stuff. We do not want to run a hosting company off of it, but we do want to use it for learning skills that may one day soon apply to us getting another box for the purpose of running a small hosting company off of it.

We all have some minor redhat experience, not enough to say we know what we are doing to run anything important on. But we figure this would be a good start, get one of these servers.. get WHM / Cpanel on it and get to learning and setting things up and so on.

Read through many of the forums and seems others have asked the same, but they seem to want a end all document or source that will 100% teach them to instantly run a server for the purpose of a hosting company.

We want to learn the skills, and have a general foundation and knowledge to build on. Some of us have been AIX and HPUX mid level admins in the past, most of us are currently Cisco engineers (which has nothing to do with this) but we have been around and are fairly confident in our abilities to learn what we don't know.

Would like to hear from others what they feel are the basic duties and skills they use for the day to day operation of their DedicatedNow server with WHM/Cpanel to function for the purpose of hosting others. This will help guide us in the right direction for the skills we can start to focus on, which always leads to more and more.. but a basic foundation to get started with would be beneficial.

Looking forward to hearing from everyone. Hope to be around for a while.

Best way is to break it and then try to fix it :)
Its the way ive learnt everything ;)

Welcome to WHT...

-Shazad

Yeah.. that tends to be my favorite method of learning as well. I tell you what, just logged into the WHM as root and well.. man there is alot there.

Any good source for optimum settings within WHM, I think it is time for lots of screen shots and searching the WHM/Cpanel forums.

Any advice and recommendations would be appreciated. I think we are more worried about security then anything else right now.

Well.. as stated previously we got access to the new server tonight. Ughh.. WHM.. there is so much to it, but it is nice. Just don't know where to begin.

We registered a new domain name that we were going to use for this thing. When DN set it up they created a DNS zone "hostname.newdomainname.com" which of course we gave them.

They also asked for 2 name servers, so we assumed they were setting that up, we gave them ns1 and ns2.newdomainname.com, assuming they were setting it up and assiging 2 of our 5 ip's to it. That does not seem to be the case however. I think our first order of business is getting DNS figured out. We should have a DNS zone for "newdomainname.com" I would imagine, not just "hostname.newdomainname.com"

Ahh well.. much to learn, its exciting. We may end up hiring some help, more to teach us and guide us, not someone who is just going to do it all themselves.

You might also want to pop over to http://www.cpanel.net and register on the forum there. Also, grab a copy of the documentation for WHM while you're at it. CPanel is fairly straight forward, but clicking madly in WHM can lead to tears :)

Naturally you'll also want to read up on shell/root access and figure out how to get around outside the control panel. While CPanel/WHM is very good, at times you will need to get your hands dirty at the command line.

Greg Moore